TerraDrive Universe:Sign your posts on talk pages
Signing your posts on TerraDrive Universe talk pages is a guideline for the use of user signatures in the TerraDrive Universe. For instructions on how to sign your posts, see below. Signing your posts on (but not on articles) is not only good etiquette; it also facilitates discussion by helping other users to identify the author of a particular comment, to navigate talk pages, and to address specific comments to the relevant user(s), among other things. Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing as it helps other users to understand the progress and evolution of a work. Purpose of signatures Signatures in the TerraDrive Universe identify you as a user, and your contributions to the community. They encourage civility in discussions by identifying the author of a particular comment, and the date and time at which it was made. Because of that, having an uncivil signature is strongly discouraged (in some cases, to the point of blocking the user until they change it). In general, anything that is not allowed in a user name should not be used in a signature either. When signatures should and should not be used Any post made to user talk pages, article talk pages, or other discussion pages should be signed. Edits to articles should not be signed, as signatures in the TerraDrive Universe are not intended to indicate ownership or authorship of any TerraDrive Universe article. Rather, the takes care of the need to identify edits with users. Signatures should therefore not be used in edit summaries as they do not translate from ~~~~. In other instances when posts should not be signed, specific instructions are provided to contributors. How to sign your posts There are two ways to sign your posts: 1. At the end of your comments, simply type four tildes (~), like this: ~~~~. 2. If you are using the option (which must be enabled under ), click the signature icon ( ) to add the four tildes. Your signature will appear after you have saved the changes. The end result is the same in both cases. Typing four tildes will result in the following: Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions. Typing three tildes results in the following: Since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page. Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this: Note that if you choose to contribute to the TerraDrive Universe without logging in, you should still sign your posts. In this case, your IP address will take the place of your username. Your IP address might look something like this: 192.0.2.58. Some users prefer to use their IP address instead of a user name because they think that an IP provides them with more anonymity. In actual fact, an account (that is, a registered user name) actually provides you with more protection of your identity as IP addresses can be easily tracked by anyone. Note also that signing manually with a pseudonym or tag such as ''--anon'' does not give you more anonymity or privacy protection, since your IP address will still be stored in the page history. This also makes it more difficult for other users to communicate with you. If you choose to sign this way, you should still type four tildes: ''--anon'' ~~~~. See also: Automatic conversion of wikitext in Help. Customizing your signature Registered users can customize their signature by going to and changing the field "Signature". When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind: A distracting, confusing or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. Some editors find it disruptive to discourse on talk pages, or when working in the edit window. Very long signatures that contain a lot of code ("markup") make it difficult for some editors to read talk pages while editing. In no circumstance should a signature be used to impersonate another user: in particular, a signature should not be identical to the actual username of another existing user. While not an absolute requirement, it is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the username it represents. If asking another user to change their signature, remember to remain polite. If you are asked to change your signature, please avoid interpreting a polite request as an attack. As the TerraDrive Universe is based on working together in harmony, both parties should work together to find a mutually acceptable solution. Appearance and color Your signature should not blink, or otherwise inconvenience or be annoying to other editors. * Markup such as tags (which produce big text), or line breaks ( tags) are to be avoided, since they disrupt the way that surrounding text displays. The limited use of non-breaking spaces to ensure that the signature displays on one line is allowed. * Be sparing with superscript or subscript. In some cases, this type of script can also affect the way that surrounding text is displayed * Avoid making your signature so small that it is difficult to read * In consideration of users with vision problems, be sparing with color. If you must use different colors in your signature, please ensure that the result will be readable by people with color blindness. Images Images of any kind may not be used in signatures for the following reasons: * they are an unnecessary drain on server resources, and could cause server slowdown * a new image can be uploaded in place of the one you chose, making your signature a target for possible vandalism and Denial-of-service attacks * they make pages more difficult to read and scan * they make it more difficult to copy text from a page * they are potentially distracting from the actual message * in most browsers images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without * they clutter up the "file links" list on the image page every time you sign on a different talk page * images in signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution As an alternative to using images, consider using unicode characters that are symbols, such as these: ☺☻♥♪♫♣♠♂♀§. For a full listing of Unicode characters see Wikibooks:Unicode/Character reference. Length Keep signatures short, both in display and markup. Extremely long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing and discussion more difficult for the following reasons: * signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it harder to distinguish posts from signatures, * long signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution, * signatures which have long HTML/wiki markup and contain no spaces cause other editors' edit boxes to show unnecessary horizontal scrollbars (such signatures may have spaces added to them by any editor), * signatures that occupy more space than necessary in the edit box displace meaningful comments, thus forcing the editor to scroll when writing his reply, and * the presence of such long signatures in the discussion also disrupts the reading of comments when an editor is formulating his reply The software will truncate long signatures to 255 characters. Internal links It is common practice to include a link to your user page or user talk page (often both); the default signature links to the user page. At least one of those 2 pages must be linked from your signature, to allow other editors simple access to your talkpage and contributions log. If, while making modifications, you inadvertently disable this link, see how to fix your signature. When you insert your signature on your talk or user page the talk or user link will appear black, bold and inactive as it is a self-reference, so test your signature elsewhere. It is better to put information on your user page, rather than in your signature. However, including brief additional internal links is generally tolerated when used to facilitate communication or to provide general information, but undesirable if seen as canvassing for some purpose. Do not place any disruptive internal links, such as SIGN HERE!!!, which refers to an autograph page. External links Do not include links to external websites in your signature. Mass posting of links to a particular website is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia. Posting a link to an external website with each comment you make on a talk page could be taken as link spamming, or an attempt to improve your website's ranking on search engines. Although this doesn't actually work, it's best not to do it. If you want to tell other Wikipedians about a good website with which you are associated, you can do so on your user page. Transclusion of templates Transclusions of templates in signatures (like those which appear as , for example) are forbidden, because they are an unnecessary drain on the servers. Transcluded signatures require extra processing--whenever you change your signature source, all talk pages you have posted on must be re-cached. Signature templates are also vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content, use no more resources than the comments themselves and avoid these problems. Categories Signatures must not contain . Categorizing talk pages by who has edited them is unhelpful, and the same information can be found by using . Many of the various edit counting utilities also provide this data. More about talk pages See Wikipedia:Talk page for accepted conventions and guidelines regarding the use of talk pages. See also * Wikipedia:How to fix your signature